I once saw a ghost and it’s caught on CCTV, honest

Nicola Adam

As our country loudly undergoes remarkable and baffling change, here in the newsroom we are quietly preparing for a much quieter change of our own.

The Lancashire Evening Post, at Olivers Place, organisational headquarters for all our North West newspapers and websites, is moving out of the office it has called home since 1989 - albeit to a sparkling new building just across the road.

For me this is significant. It is here at ‘LEP Towers’ I began my journalistic career.

Despite holding loads of positions as I climbed the ladder to Editor - including four years away altogether - I seem to have ended up sitting in this office about three steps from where I began as a terrified trainee of weekly free paper the now defunct Preston Reporter.

From where I type I can still see fellow trainee Aasma Day - with the realisation we have known each other half of our lives and survived careers in parallel.

This place has so many memories for me, from terrible to fantastic.

In this room I watched the twin towers collapse.

I have greeted three Prime Ministers and several members of the royal family.

I have celebrated exclusive stories, practised my swearing, cried in the toilets and wondered, along with every other woman, who exactly is responsible for the line of bogeys on the toilet wall.

I have listened patiently to readers, interviewed celebrities, spoken to distressed families, despaired at conspiracy theorists and attended hundreds of news conferences to have newslists and front page ideas torn apart and analysed.

I once saw a ghost in here (no really, it was caught on CCTV) and have thrown hundreds of unappetising machine coffees on my keyboard (not all on purpose...).

As news editor, I was summoned back here dozens of times at around 3am to address publishing problems, once memorably in my pyjamas and Ugg boots, not expecting dozens of white-suited printers jeering at me from the smoking shelter.